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Similar is done by other spreadsheets, the handling of the different amount of decimal digits which can be exactly stored in the 53 bit mantissa of a 'double' (e.g. 16 digits between 1 and 8, but only 15 between 1 / 2 and 1 and between 8 and 10) is somewhat difficult and solved 'suboptimal'.
In base 10, this is simplest for =,,, where higher digits except for the unit digit vanish (since 2 and 5 divide powers of 10), which corresponds to the familiar fact that the divisibility of a decimal number with respect to 2, 5, and 10 can be checked by the last digit.
In the IEEE standard the base is binary, i.e. =, and normalization is used. The IEEE standard stores the sign, exponent, and significand in separate fields of a floating point word, each of which has a fixed width (number of bits).
A decimal separator is a symbol that separates the integer part from the fractional part of a number written in decimal form. Different countries officially designate different symbols for use as the separator. The choice of symbol can also affect the choice of symbol for the thousands separator used in digit grouping.
Huberto M. Sierra noted in his 1956 patent "Floating Decimal Point Arithmetic Control Means for Calculator": [1] Thus under some conditions, the major portion of the significant data digits may lie beyond the capacity of the registers. Therefore, the result obtained may have little meaning if not totally erroneous.
For example, while a fixed-point representation that allocates 8 decimal digits and 2 decimal places can represent the numbers 123456.78, 8765.43, 123.00, and so on, a floating-point representation with 8 decimal digits could also represent 1.2345678, 1234567.8, 0.000012345678, 12345678000000000, and so on.
In contrast to decimal, or radix 10, which has a ones' place, tens' place, hundreds' place, and so on, radix b would have a ones' place, then a b 1 s' place, a b 2 s' place, etc. [2] For example, if b = 12, a string of digits such as 59A (where the letter "A" represents the value of ten) would represent the value 5 × 12 2 + 9 × 12 1 + 10 × ...
"A base is a natural number B whose powers (B multiplied by itself some number of times) are specially designated within a numerical system." [1]: 38 The term is not equivalent to radix, as it applies to all numerical notation systems (not just positional ones with a radix) and most systems of spoken numbers. [1]